Valery Gross

I have always been an active person. I did a variety of athletic activities growing up including: dance, gymnastics, soccer, lacrosse, and weightlifting. I was too busy in college to play intramural sports, so I took up lifting weights in the gym and occasionally going running. For years, I was pretty bored. My routines were the same, the results were unidentifiable, and I was doing it on my own. Shortly after moving to Seattle, I hired a personal trainer in an attempt to meet some new people and learn some new moves. During our workouts, he had me doing some circuit training and other basic lifts and I started to see a lot of progress in my strength. The results encouraged me to do more. One day, this trainer asked me if I had ever seen a video called "Nasty Girls". So naturally I immediately went home and watched it. After I saw this video I decided I wanted to be able to do 95-lb hang-power cleans and whatever that thing on the rings was. Oh and that I wanted six-pack abs. The next training session I told my trainer I wanted to be able to accomplish what those girls in the video were doing and that was when he introduced me to CrossFit. After our training sessions expired, I proceeded to devour the CrossFit website. I read everything I could get my hands on and began following the main page doing the WOD in the local 24-Hour Fitness. After a few months of going at it alone, I decided to attended a CrossFit Level I Certification, not because I wanted to be a trainer, but because CrossFit had changed my life and I wanted to learn more about it. My workouts had become dynamic, interesting, super hard, and super fast. I used to spend over an hour in the gym milling about different exercises with no real purpose or goal. With CrossFit I started getting measurable results. I was hooked. I tracked my progress obsessively with all kinds of spreadsheets. I saw my strength skyrocket and my stamina improve. As an added bonus, I was leaner and buffer than ever before. After months of gong at it alone at 24-Hour Fitness, a friend of mine told me she had joined a local CrossFit gym. While I was having fun with the workouts, doing them alone was tough. There was no one to encourage you to move faster or go harder. I also realized the few times I did the workouts with a friend, that there is something forged through mutual pain and suffering. And so I joined CrossFit Interbay.

CrossFit has helped me achieve some miraculous, and what I used to think were impossible, goals. For example I can currently deadlift and squat more than twice my body weight and my mile time is currently the fastest it has ever been in my life. While I believe that there are many effective exercise programs out there, CrossFit is the ONLY program that reaches all skill levels, all ages, and all abilities. And it is the ONLY program that improve a person's all around fitness. And it is the ONLY program that all at once improves the ten fundamental areas of fitness: endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. CrossFit doesn't strive to make you good at any one thing, CrossFit strives to make you good at EVERYTHING.

So why do I CrossFit? Because, with CrossFit I do twice as much work in half the time; with CrossFit I continually improve my fitness at all levels; with CrossFit I get real, measurable results; with CrossFit I get a community of support and a ton of friends to cheer me on and work with me; Does your fitness program do that for you? If not, come find out what CrossFit can do!